Want to personalize your webcast delivery?

Ken Molay at WSuccess recently shared this webinar presentation tip that resonated with us:

“Speak to the Individual, Not the Crowd”.

Rather than use phrases like “can anyone in our audience tell me ….” speaker directly to each listener “can you tell me …”.

This goes a long way toward personalizing your delivery and leaving your listeners with a more personal experience.

Thanks for the great tip Ken.

Tags: effective presentations, presentations, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

When you are considering a purchase, who do you ask for your advice?

If your like me, you start with your friends. And you will probably seek out the ones who have some experience or passion related to your purchase. If I want to buy a guitar, I’d seek out a cousin who is a musician. If I want a new telephone system, I’d ask a half dozen of my friends that are consultants, managers and business owners  – the ones that make their living on the telephone..  Depending on the purchase, I would do more research online, on industry sites and forums, and visit your web site.  At this point, I’m ready to buy – for big-ticket items I’ve got a short list and will now call a company rep.

By now your starting to realize that in the early stages I may not spend much time on your site – in some cases I may not even visit it.  So as a marketer, you need to find a way to reach me through the mediums I am using.

Webcasts – audio and slides or video -  not only are good at educating the prospects you know about, but can be a compelling way to help your customers (my friends) and your evangelists (the ones commenting in user groups, message boards, and industry forums) share your story.

You can continue to deliver your webcasts live, but make sure you create an archive in bit-sized chunks and share it with the world – in your newsletter, on your site,  with user groups, on message boards.  Make it easy for your fans to share it too.  Its a great way to keep your name in the conversation and help your friends spread the word.

Tags: archives, conversations, live event recordings, Marketing, On-Demand, Promotion, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.

In June BtoB Online asked their webcast audience the question “How does your organization evaluate unstructured comments from customers?”

The results:

72%      We review each one manually
21%      We collect but don’t analyze it
6%        We use text mining tools
1%        We have an individual code the responses

Now you must interpret the results from any webinar poll understanding that the audience was not randomly selected and may not be statistically significant, but if this makes you think for a moment about how your using your viewer feedback than this is a good exercise!

The intelligent use of polls and surveys is an effective method for gathering feedback, but also for discovering your target audience needs and concerns. We have used polls effectively to uncover new or related applications for products and services.  So give those polls and surveys some thought, use them during during your webinar, and then listen to what your audience is really telling you.

Tags: customer feedback, Marketing, polls, surveys, Webcasts, webinars.

The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

Is it time to use Twitter as part of our webcast strategy?

Twitter has become a true social phenomena.  As the eMarketer chart below shows,  Twitter’s popularity continues to grow:

ComScore reported 4 million unique visitors in February 2009 while Nielson Online reported 7 million. Both services show the growth rate above 1000% year over year. Twitter is heavily used within tech and has surprisingly strong adoption by the older tech demographic.

So will this community (or more accurately, federation of communities) be interested in educational or informational-oriented webcasts? According to a MarketingProf’s survey of Twitter users,  both the statements “I find it exciting to learn new things from people” and “I value getting information in a timely manner” were rated 4.5+ on a 5 point scale.

I know companies that are using Twitter today as a promotional medium for video webcasts, and you can easily integrate Twitter into an event or webinar to replace or augment an integrated chat capability.  I have seen Twitter used  at conferences as a means for the panelists to engage with the audience and as a tool for submitting questions.

In the examples above Twitter is being used for promotion and engagement.  To fully tap into  the word-of-mouth power of Twitter,  we may want to re-think presentation formats – short form content that can be quickly accessed and shared (e.g. video) may be a better choice than traditional webinar technologies like WebEx.    I can see the day when we use our event recordings and create discrete “highlight” video segments that can be shared with our new Twitter followers so they can propagate the message!

So are you planning on using Twitter with your webinars? Can you see using it with a live event that is webcast?

Tags: LinkedIn, tweets, twitter, Webcasts.

Having trouble with your Adobe Connect audio or connection?

Here is a link to test your system:

Adobe Connect Meeting system test

If your problem is audio-related, we have found the simplest thing to do is dial the conference bridge number from your telephone. The VOIP service is not always reliable.

Hope this helps.

Tags: Adobe Connect, problems, Webcasts, webinars.

Webinars. You know they are out there, but inevitably when the topic in question becomes a priority for you, you just can’t find them. Google is your first stop, but the results are just lost in the mass of content they provide. You may visit key industry hubs, but you wonder if your missing anything.

For you there is now a solution:  Webinar Today – the webinar search engine.

Webinar Today Search

We have been busy compiling an index of web seminars, starting with security, storage, marketing, and VOIP.  We invite you to try it out and see what you think.

If you know of webinars that should be added to this index, please suggest them by following the link at the bottom of the page.  As long as they are educational and informational, we will add them to the index.

Now we consider this a beta release, but please let us know what you think!

Tags: LinkedIn, search, Web Seminars, Webcasts.

We edit live webinars to produce event recordings that can be used for post-webinar marketing and training, and think alot about how to get the most out of these live events. Many of our customers will update specific slides or request that we edit out details like pricing that may change over time. Between judicious editing, recording new narration, and adding a moderator voice-over, we can really extend the life of these recordings.

However, there are a few simple things that would make our life easier, and would help any company that wants to extend the shelf-life of their content: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Editing, event replays, Microsoft PowerPoint, recording, reusability, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

While learning about ‘Getting Things Done’ I discovered this great blog – Merlin Mann’s 43Folders.

He has been blogging for a long time and 43Folders started out focused on productivity solutions like GTD.  Although his focus has changed, his blog is still a good read.

He uses a presentation style that we also are putting into practice.

What’s really exciting is that this presentation works so well both for the live audience and the video webcast – the slides add to his message without taking your focus away from him as the speaker and what he is saying.  And from a technical perspective, the slide imagery avoids small text fonts that video does a poor job of broadcasting.

Take a look at this video of his final presentation: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: effective presentations, GTD, live event recordings, Video, video webcasts, Webcasts.